Thursday, July 13, 2017

I
had the opportunity to visit Barcus and Esquiule last​ year, their churches, graveyards and town halls. But only Marie Larrory was supposed to be
buried there (Marianne Etchegoren migrated with her family shortly
after Marguerite Lerdou was born). Unfortunately she was not in the
grave of the present-day Larrory and she could be buried in one of the
many unkept headstones which names are almost completely erased.

We
waited for the town hall to open and asked for information regarding
these tombs. They had none, the oldest records went missing a long
time ago and recommended to try to identify them by gravestone rubbing. They were many headstones in this pitiful condition and we
were only there for the day. I guess a collaborative restoration and
indexing project is in order.

When
you start playing rock-paper-scissors, you may intuitively consider
the paper as the weakest element and the rock as the strongest. But
the beauty of the game is showing that all three elements are just as
resistant. It just depends on how we use them.

Unless
you are very very lucky, you've been there, you've seen the paper
trail vanish in front of your eyes: lost baptismal books, torn marriage records, missing pages of a notary's archives, whole
churches burned to the ground (yeah, thank you, Carlist Wars) or
plain and simple bureaucratic stupidity.

But
of course, silly me! It is just paper! So you consider using a tougher
material. After all, that is the whole purpose of a headstone:
eternity.

Some headstones display a lot of information, besides
the usual dates of birth and death, and the FAN (Friends And
Neighbors) strategy can uncover even more data. Moreover, if you are
well versed in the subject of funerary art, you could even come up
with an accurate profile of the family's socioeconomic status. So,
again, the
strength of this resource depends
on how we use it, but also, the cultural context of our ancestors,
and our own.

I've
had avoided cemeteries as much as possible. In my culture
(catholic-based but no more, extremely urban and obsessed with
youth), you can easily ignore they even exist. But then I visited
France and found myself walking around the well kept graves by the
church of a village in Alsace. They didn't have tons of information
but many had those telling details of lives well lived and suddenly, I
didn't find it so gloomy. Then, it became easier, and, given the
chance, I would visit the cemetery whenever I visit a village.

But
when it comes to bigger towns, it is a whole other story. If they are
not glamorous historical places where you can find A-list celebrities
like Oscar Wilde in Pére Lachaise, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir together in
Montparnasse or Evita Peron in Recoleta, they can be quite sad.

But
again, what are the chances of finding your great grand uncle buried
next to Jim Morrison? (Hopefully, very low, the place is a mess).

Their
big advantage is that they usually have an administrator, databases,
a direct phone number and an e-mail address (seems obvious? Well,
some of them don't). So when I started to work in Genealogy and ran
out of resources to find information about that narrow time-frame
between my elder's memories and public available data, I had to chose
rock. Luckily, at least two of the main branches of my tree had
established in the same town back in the Province of Buenos Aires,
Argentina (and their cemetery has an institutional e-mail address!).

I wrote my first email asking about my Sosas 8 and 9 with estimated
dates and got an immediate reply from the administrator. 8 was
there, and I got an exact date of death, but 9 wasn't (she was quite a character, actually). I've
continued to email for information about other ancestors so I could
ask the civil registry for death certificates, which were free of
charge if you can provide the exact date (if you can't, you can pay,
they will take your money and still not search for the records). I was filling the information gap faster than ever (except for my dear Margherite, who's date of death was missing).

Later
the same year, I had the opportunity to go home and took my parents
to a Genealogy road trip to our ancestor's town. Long story
short: the copy machine of the civil registry was broken (so,
logically, no searches), there was nobody in charge of the records in the church and the café across the main square was closed
for mourning. Everything seemed to point out in the same direction.
So we finally visited the cemetery. My contact was on vacation but I
got a glimpse of how they had their files organized: a big poster
with the coordinates of the parcels and an excel sheet that can only
be opened in a very old PC that runs on Windows 3.11. Of course they
have the original books but when we don't know the dates, it will
take them too long to find what we need.

Big
deal! All the information is carved in stone, right? Well, maybe
initially it is, but sometimes headstones or metal plaques are
removed, changed and summarized, losing all those telling details a
database can never reflect.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Recap: After one unsuccessful attempt, one not even tried and one
shortcut, I found a way to leave the comfort zone and try a new
technique to search for Marianne's hometown. Voici, la Etxe!

Esquiule
is part of the Basque Country and for the Basque culture, the
father's house (maison in French, Etxe in Basque) remains in the
family for many generations, if not forever. This way, the houses
become lieu dit or landmarks and sometimes, the street also carries
the family name. There could easily be a Maison Etchegoren nearby.

So
where in the area may the Etchegoren house be? According to Google
maps there is a maison Etchegoren and belongs to Barcus, the closest
town to the West. This house is also mapped in the cadastre (a map
that registers the properties of a certain district).

Right: Cadastre of one of the districts of Barcus. Left: detail with the maison Etchegoren and neighbors.

I
browsed the Tables Decenales of Barcus around 1818 for the birth of
Marianne (who was 34 years old at the time Marguerite was born) and
the next decade for her wedding. I found a Marie Etchegoren in 1815
(math was not their forte, or they really liked to lie about their
age) and the wedding in 1843 of Gabriel Lerdou Hilarreguiborde with a
27 year old Marie Etchegoren (born about 1816). Was she the same
person?

Fortunally, the mayor of Barcus in charge of writing down the act
clears this out for us: "Marie surnomée (a.k.a) Marianne
Etchegoren". Both acts also name Marianne's parents: Benoit
Etchegoren and Marie Larrory.

The
marriage record has an extra hint. Before the name of her mother
their is the particle "feue" which means the late (as in
deceased). Marie Larrory had died before her daughter's wedding and I
found her death record in 1838, she was 51 years old but the only
information of filiation are regarding to her husband and his house.

This
was a new opportunity to test the Etxe theory: Google it, or even
better, Cadastre it. The house of Larrory is literally down the road (take another look to the detail in the picture).

Unfortunally,
the Tables Decenales don't go back in time forever and neither does
the civil registry.

Recap:
I had traced Margherite Lerdou all the way back to Esquiule, France,
where she was born and cofirmed the names of her parents: Gabriel
Lerdou Hilarreguiborde, born in Esquiule, and Marianne Etchegoren,
born elswhere. Seems like I will be heading... Elswhere.

Leaving
your comfort zone is not easy, but since you are already there, you
might as well get something done. So I tried my old trick of Geopatronyme for the Etchegoren lastname but with only 5 hits between
1891-1915, the distribution was not going to mean much.

There
was an even older trick, that I hadn't used before, and that some
experts like to call “L'escargot”. No, it doesn't mean it will
take forever to search for records in other towns, quite the
contrary. We grab a map of the area and we pin the last known
residence of the person (in this case was Esquiule, where Marianne
gave birth to Margherite), that will be the center of our cloud of
possible hometowns. Then, it is pretty much like connecting the dots,
we draw a line to the closest town and the next dot should be as
close to the center as possible (you will probably end drawing a
snail, which I hate so I don't care about representing them correctly).

It
does seem logical and sometimes it works. But we must keep in mind
the circumstances in terms of Geography and History. What if there
are mountains (like in this particular area) and towns are better
connected by the roads of the valley than across the mountains? What
if there was an exodus towards the cities?! Which cities?!! Where they
moving east to reach the Mediterranean, or west, towards the harbors of the Atlantic to migrate to the Americas??? What about moving to Paris??? (ok, let's stay realistic, here).

Before
drowning myself in questions, I decided to take a short cut and see
what the experts have already found. Luckily, one of Geneanet's power
users had already found Marianne and Gabriel's marriage record in the
bride's hometown. Thank you blaplume! (please let me know how you'd prefer to be cited).

See what I did there? I'm giving proper credit to the person that did the research. It doesn't hurt at all and we all should do this as part of our research.

I cannot be more clear about this: the rest of the information you will find about Marianne after she left France was copied from a GEDCOM file created by me (it either leaked from GEDMATCH or Ancestry) without giving proper credit, nor answering messages. The original dates of the findings and attached documents are in FamilySearch entered by the user Na+, et Na+ c'est moi. I have a system to trace the information I release and I will discuss it in another post.

En of rant and back to happy!

If you
are not so lucky, here is one more trick that I learnt later and
should work very well for those researching their Basque roots.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Twile is a website
where you can upload your tree and create timelines for your family.
It is free and accepting feedback. Speak now or forever wonder why
you cannot find what you need.

As soon as I learned
this tool became free, I signed up and started to test it. I had been
waiting for a tool that would not only list my ancestor's events
(birth, residence, marriage, death, etc) in chronological order, but
also, put their lives in context.

Location, location,
location.

I had used the maps
where you can pin down the events geographically, which gives you a
nice idea of the cultural origins, migrations and clues about where
else to find records. But it became clear, early enough, that the
town where my great-grandmother grew up, although in the same
geographical spot, was not the same in which her daughter grew up, nor
where her grand daughters were born. And you should see it now,
because you can, if you go to Google Maps and use the street view
tool. But how about then ? And when is then exactly ?

« You are
forgetting the fourth dimension, Marty ».

Time is the key
resource when using Twile. You sign up, upload your tree (even
transfer from FamilySearch, although it has some issues with
« special » characters, like simple accents) and you
chose the Timeline view, which you can customize to suit your needs.
At least some of them for the moment.

So, what's in the
timeline ?

The most basic
information would be the recognizable fields you already have in your
tree (mainly birth, marriage and death), and then you can add
milestones (education, voyages, prices, recruitment, etc).

You can chose to
display the timeline of either one person, you and your direct family
and, the whole tree (meaning everybody you have transferred or
uploaded). So, for example, you could visualize how the events of two
houses occur in parallel until their children get married ; or
whether the length of generations is even among branches.

Context, context,
context.

But what makes it
really stand out is the possibility of adding historical events, this
is what really gives you context. However, it is highly biased
towards USA history. You do get WWI and WWII events and Inventions,
which I emphatically recommend to understand why there are no
pictures of your 5x grandfather's car (no, not even on Instagram).

Screen capture of several juxtaposed branches (from Argentina, Spain and Italy)...
plus the invention of the car.

I decided not to be
shy and send them some direct feedback (down right corner talking
balloon that reads Talk to us) and they answered later by email (not
a bot!) : they are working on it (already aware of the special character's problem) ... and they are open to
suggestions.

Make History Yours

So I started to
brainstorm (with me, myself and I, these gals are nuts...) some ideas
and I'm still pondering whether I should share them and how. Here are some of them:

Go Global: of course, world,
country or regional history are the first things to add (no-brainers,
no umbrellas required).

Contemporaneous but not mixed: I would also like to display the lines of
different branches in parallel so if they their origins are different
you can customize their historical events (say Italians and Irish).

Stop clutter: The ability to narrow the time-frame or the branch we want to display
would be useful too (maybe it is there, I haven't seen it, I know you
can delete events but didn't dare to) to avoid clutter. And export or
print would be nice too (the image was a screen capture).

Considering
that it is a free tool, and hoping it stays as such, it should be
able to profit from user generated content, which users can upload
and share, evaluate and improve, like packs of events for a specific
purpose (fashion, political movements, musical trends, etc). Let's
also go wiki and encourage the experts to validate content.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Genealogists may
come in all shapes and sizes but if there is one thing we have in
common is our thirst for knowledge. As such, some of us have learnt
on the go and keep looking for opportunities to learn new techniques
and improve the quality of our research.

I came across a
great opportunity this year to test my methods and get everything
straight from the beginning and I couldn't refuse it so I joined a
free MOOC at FutureLearn called Genealogy : Researching YourFamily Tree, which I will review once it is over.

In the meantime, I
wanted to share one of the concepts that were discussed very early
during week 2 : Mind mapping.

Mind mapping is a
graphic way to organize your ideas hierarchically and experts like
veteran genealogist (his words) Ron Arons areusing it to improve
their research.

Yes, it does sound
like we've been doing this for years one way or the other but,
sometimes, we've been restricted by space, or our system is far from
reproducible, or we just simply don't like to doodle. Don't panic !
There is an app. There are many apps, some free and I tested one of
them.

Mindly offers a
basic app for free (with in app purchases) and I installed it a few
days ago. I was able to learn how to use it in less than 10 minutes
and it took less than an hour to translate my to do list looking
research plan into a nice constellation of concepts.

Here is how they looks like in an early developmental stage.

I started with the
main topic which was : Finding information about my great great
grandfather Cipriano. Then I split the information into 3 different
bubbles : what I know (Bio), what I want to know (Questions),
and where to look (Sources). Each of these bubbles contains facts or
clues or questions. For example inside Bio we will have Birth, Marriage, Children. Inside Questions there is Date and Place of Death. Inside Sources I will add links to only the likely sources (no point to look for him in Thailand, for instance). They can also contain images and links. When I
find an answer from Questions I just move the bubble to Bio. And
voila !